my second childhoodhttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com
who the hell thought I'd be doing music - and washing dishes - at this stage?Sun, 18 Mar 2018 19:54:20 +0000en-GBhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngmy second childhoodhttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com
echo beach – martha & the muffinshttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/_18-03-18/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/_18-03-18/#respondSun, 18 Mar 2018 19:32:52 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=968The WorldWideWeb and social media are arguably the greatest technological breakthrough since television – and what have we used it for? Splitting into tribes like apes armed with sticks.
In days gone by, people felt unique and, to an extent, isolated. People who grew up in small towns moved as soon as they could, to Edinburgh, Glasgow or Manchester. People growing up in Glasgow, Liverpool or Dundee moved to London. I’ve lost count of the people I knew who flitted south “where there’s more people like me”. Musicians, artists, LGBTQ people. They all fled South, leaving me with those too old to go, and those still too young yet.
Nowadays, your community – where they ‘get’ you – is a couple of taps away in your phone. Everybody has a welcoming community, and all it took was lowering our collective standards a little.
And there’s always trolls. Those mouths on independence chats who toss in a bit of abuse about the Scottish government and leave. Those of us who leave pro-indy arguments on the comments section of a BBC story about Nicola Sturgeon killing someone’s cattle. Any cult needs external enemies. It creates cohesiveness within the group, a sense of belonging. Just ask the Reverend Jim Jones or L Ron Hubbard.
I was a member of Informed Consent back-in-the-day. A community of like-minded perverts from the UK BDSM scene. I remember, shortly before the 2010 general election, several members of ‘my’ community, exhorting all around them to vote Conservative – to get rid of the communist, Gordon Brown. These are my clan – the creeps and weirdos – and yet, for some reason, they saw Shrek the way the right see Corbyn or Sturgeon today.

So there I was, in a community of like-minded souls, where people spouted the most outrageous guff. To the rational mind, sharing an opinion with someone does not make you party to any other shite they may choose to believe. Presumably the end result of each of us living in our own corporate/personalised echo chambers will be everybody back to the same 20th century isolation. Believing in Scottish independence AND astrology will make you an enemy of both armies.

Mibby my grandkids will understand that it’s the voices that disagree with us that we should be listening to. And disagreeing with.

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/_18-03-18/feed/0scatcandyfeed the enemy – magazinehttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/965/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/965/#respondSun, 11 Mar 2018 20:17:32 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=965I actually look back on the New Musical Express with fondness from about 1976-1982. After that, it tended to reflect the shitty music that was available across the mainstream – from Haircut 100 to Kajagoogoo.
Arguably worthwhile writers like Paul Morley were reduced to writing about shite like Scritti Politti as the most interesting music started to come from underground – the 80s tape scene (literally from punk to power electronics!) was covered in Sounds – but not the NME.
Throbbing Gristle generally got ‘single of the week’ every time they released something, but were never interviewed after 1978 – after all, their record label had a tiny wee picture of Auschwitz on it. So the fact that they were almost single-handedly wrenching popular music out of its comfort zone hardly mattered, did it?
And the NME had previous for this sort of thing. In the late 1950s, they’d railed against suggestive beat-group front man Cliff Richard, claiming he was a danger to the pop kids of the day.
And around Christmas 1981, I noticed that the NME was completely irrelevant. As the music industry left the sort of people who loved music behind and fell into the hands of marketers and such like, it became hip to embrace shite – ironically, mind. Unfortunately, when you sprinkle hundreds and thousands over a dog turd, it’s still just a dog turd with sugar on top.
The last time I bought the NME was when Fad Gadget died (nae internet in those days) and he didn’t even merit a mention. There was an article on the emerging electroclash scene, which turned out to be pretty good, albeit in a superficial kind of way – and for a very brief time.
So farewell NME. You were missed in 1982, but not today. The same way people commemorated the death of that nice Mrs Thatcher when her body died. Anything that had animated her, for good or ill, had evaporated years before, leaving only a painted shell.

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/965/feed/0scatcandywinter – the fallhttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/winter-the-fall/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/winter-the-fall/#respondSun, 04 Mar 2018 20:07:20 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=961If climate change is imaginary, why is the weather at the start of the news, instead of at the end? And last night, we had an hour-long Reporting Scotland special on the fact that it was a bit cold.

Across the country, people are being taken by surprise by a bit of snow. It’s not like the weather hasn’t happened before. And yet, each time, the tabloids sound like we’ve been invaded by refugees from outer space.

I’ve been off work all week as most of my colleagues were unable to get in. I’ve kept myself busy tinkering with the next aQa LP, watching ‘Homeland’ (again) and ‘The Bridge’. And rereading Jo Nesbo’s ‘The Devil’s Star’.

Being snowed in is a novelty. I live in Fife, where there are procedures in place because this has happened before.

In November 2010, at 5pm in Dunfermline bus station, the snow was hammering down. An inspector told everyone standing around that there’d be zero buses until the following morning. So I had to walk home. The following morning, at 06:00, I heard a bus passing. The gritters had been out overnight and kissed everything better. Right enough, I did live on the main road, half a mile away from the gritters’ HQ, but the fact remains – in Fife, sudden snowfalls are dealt with promptly and decisively. And, on that occasion, the snow was so bad, we didn’t see the car for six weeks.

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/winter-the-fall/feed/0scatcandyback in the night – dr feelgoodhttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/25/back-in-the-night-dr-feelgood/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/25/back-in-the-night-dr-feelgood/#respondSun, 25 Feb 2018 20:57:15 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=960It’s almost as if my life’s gone full circle. Which is good, since if this is the case, I must be almost finished and can look forward to a nice long rest in the ground.
It’s odd, going back to catering work after all these years. When I abandoned the industry, back in the mid-nineties, I presumed it was for keeps.
Of course, that was the point where I stopped working with sound, in favour of writing fiction. What if my last twenty-five years were just a cul-de-sac? Working in care, writing and performing fiction, mibby these were just a phase I was going through.
Music technology has improved by leaps and bounds since the 1980s. If I want tape hiss today, there’s an app for that, and it probably comes with settings for ‘shitty old ghetto-blaster’, ‘ancient VHS’ and ‘dusty charity shop 7″ reels’. Most bands in those days had one (battered old) synth, often used for that group’s trademark sound. Nowadays, there’s a few dozen given away free with ‘Computer Music’ every month. Searching in DuckDuckGo for ‘VST free download’ coughs up hundreds, if not thousands of synths and effects.
So funny noises can be plucked from the trees these days. With today’s DAWs, the scope for editing and mixing is far beyond anything available during the razor blade years. So why are so many people simply making the same sort of racket as everybody else? In that sense, we haven’t, as a culture, progressed in the last thirty-five years.
I think I’m producing work broadly similar to what I produced between 1983 and 1995, but everything’s smaller. My Zoom digital recorder fits in one hand, a fraction of the size of my trusty early ’80s doubledeck, which could barely be carried and was difficult to hide when I was recording something surreptitiously. The computer I do most of my work on fits on a desk in a room half the size of my bedroom at Halmyre Street with its piles of synths and reel-to-reels and that treacherous carpet of cables to snag the unwary ankle.
Today, I can sit down and potter with MIDI, and if I want a coffee, I don’t have to climb out through a web of cables to get it.
The biggest change for me is in editing. MIDI lets me make changes in minutes that would have taken an hour or two in the olden days. The main benefit of this is that I can have a ridiculous idea and bring it into being quickly and easily. No thinking – straight to stupid.
With this technology, my work with Virullex!, or the Compulsion Brothers would have been quite different. But then so would the work of Opera For Infantry, Un-kommuniti or Trench Music Kore.

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/25/back-in-the-night-dr-feelgood/feed/0scatcandyvictoria – the fallhttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/victoria-the-fall/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/victoria-the-fall/#respondSun, 18 Feb 2018 20:13:54 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=959In the two years I didn’t post in this journal, I kept myself busy with a string of romantic interludes. Taking a leaf from Sir John Major’s book, I chose a return to Victorian values, enjoying dalliance after dalliance as perhaps Gladstone himself might have.

Here are just some of the highlights:

1. Fustigated by woman of low moral standing.
2. Obliged to place mouth upon nether regions of enraged and inebriated woman.
3. Set upon by she-brigands.
4. Scolded by coarse woman of foreign extraction.
5. Manhandled by ruffians in petticoats.
6. Divested of clothing whilst subjected to choice language and blasphemies.
7. Forced over ottoman; befucked by vicious woman with artificial pizzle of great girth.
8. Seduced and abandoned.
9. Subjected to infamies by elderly and most aggressive woman.
10. Belaboured unmercifully by feminine mountebanks and their poltroons.

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/victoria-the-fall/feed/0scatcandydevil behind that bush – the crampshttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/devil-behind-that-bush-the-cramps/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/devil-behind-that-bush-the-cramps/#respondSun, 11 Feb 2018 20:04:05 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=958February 13th, 2018 is not only Henry Rollins’ 57th birthday, but for those of you familiar with the US sitcom ‘Parks and Recreation’, Galantine’s Day. It’s also the release date for some of my new work. Just in time for Valentines day, making it the perfect accompaniment to slow, languid lovemaking or a ferocious sexual attack under cover of darkness, depending on preference.

‘Sexorcism!’ https://icke.bandcamp.com/ is the first long player from aQa in quite some time, seven tracks of PowerDreich I’ve been working on for the last six months or so.
Have you ever needed to perform an exorcism in a hurry and not known where to begin? Then this album is for you!
Ladies! Are demons upsetting someone you love, getting in the way and spewing invectives and blasphemies in all directions? Simply turn down the lights, pop this into your music centre, and Bob’s your uncle!

’23 Minutes over Bootle’ https://m.soundcloud.com/vanilla-icke is a stand alone track recorded in the same period as ‘Sexorcism!’
Channelling the souls of Martin Rev, Ken Dodd and Christopher Mayhew, this is a beautiful, meditative piece for domestic or bedroom use.

Everyone looks stupid when they make love – so why not let aQa guide you through the forest of communication to the waters of romance, where you can trap your feet in the shopping trollies of pleasure, screaming silent bubbles as you slip into the gentle murk and are forgotten, forever.

]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/devil-behind-that-bush-the-cramps/feed/0scatcandyback from the dead – the advertshttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/04/back-from-the-dead-the-adverts/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/04/back-from-the-dead-the-adverts/#commentsSun, 04 Feb 2018 20:30:15 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=955I was surprised to discover that two years had gone by since I last posted on this blog. Real life can ambush you sometimes, can’t it?
Enough people have commented on the celebrity deaths that smeared themselves over 2016 like a corpse in a Derek Raymond novel. Bowie’s being the worst, followed by Alan Vega’s. Hitting that age, when you’re outliving your record collection, isn’t for the faint-hearted.
And then there was Brexit – and President Baby Hands, proving to me that I’m not in fact the most nihilistic creature imaginable. Around half of the population seem hell-bent on mass extinction – while at the same time, no doubt dismissing my record collection as ‘depressing’. People ain’t no good. I’ve said it before, and it seems like we’re stuck with it.
Last year, we lost less celebrities, although the short-sighted imbeciles in positions of power were brutally honest with us about how little any of our lives matter.
Despicable May’s frivolous general election, followed by a great shaking of the magic money tree to bribe a tribe of homophobic throwbacks to keep her in what passes for ‘power’ nowadays. The insanity of leaving the EU, with no strategy at all for how we’ll survive when they close ranks once we’ve finished dislodging ourselves.
On the upside, the world itself had become so surreal and ridiculous by the death of 2017, that strong action had to be taken.
A holiday in Liverpool, spent with people who knew me ten years ago (and who remembered me as a cheery wee soul) climaxed with me resigning from a job I hated, which I probably should have done around the time Lemmy’s body gave out.
I’d been half-heartedly looking for something better, although working a fifty hour week, with three to four hours travelling time per day, didn’t leave me much time – or strength – to get this done.
Compounding that, my confidence was through the floor, due to spending fifty hours or so each week being told I was bad, crap and wrong by oxygen thieves.
I haven’t written any fiction since April of 2016. The lack of time, energy and confidence wrung out any possibility of being in my own head for long enough to imagine anything, anywhere else, let alone type these ideas up. That hurt.
The quotation marks around this period of dip were the deaths of David Bowie and Mark E Smith, two figures I never met, but whose work – and the interviews around that work, influenced my own worldview.
So, Bowie’s dead, The Fall have gone and I’m back to washing dishes for a living. And working in sound as opposed to text.
When I was in my twenties, I always maintained that I planned to outgrow music by about forty and write fiction instead. I had no idea that it was only going to be a temporary measure!
The technology that’s available and affordable these days is a far cry from the cassettes and cables of the 1980s. So the question that remains is, is my new stuff any good?

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/02/04/back-from-the-dead-the-adverts/feed/1scatcandyfictionromance – buzzcockshttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/01/29/fictionromance-buzzcocks/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/01/29/fictionromance-buzzcocks/#respondMon, 29 Jan 2018 22:58:14 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=952I haven’t posted in here for a while, so I thought I’d kick off with a list of all the books I worked my way through in 2017.

03 i 17 – a decent ride – Irvine Welsh

07 i 17 – the apocalypse codex – Charles Stross

09 i 17 – broken skin – Stuart MacBride

10 i 17 – lifeless – mark Billingham

12 i 17 – a rage in harlem – Chester himes

13 i 17 – quite ugly one morning – Christopher Brookmyre

16 i 17 – London Calling – James Craig

19 i 17 – modesty blaise – peter O’donnell

20 i 17 – blacklands – belinda bauer

23 i 17 – killing floor – Lee child

24 i 17 – knots & crosses – ian rankin

25 i 17 – black metal – dayal Patterson

27 i 17 – porcelain – Moby

31 i 17 – apple-tree yard Louise doughty

03 ii 17 – who killed mr moonlight – David j

10 ii 17 – further tales of the city – armistead maupin

13 ii 17 – you only live twice – ian fleming

15 iii 17 – country of the blind – Christopher Brookmyre

24 iii 17 – the cruise with Jim Anchower – the Onion

29 iii 17 – die trying – Lee Child

08 iv 17 – one kick – Chelsea cain

10 iv 17 – art music sex – cosey fanny tutti

12 iv 17 – I was Dora Suarez – Derek Raymond

22 iv 17 – still midnight – Denise Mina

30 v 17 – the bat – Jo nesbo

05 vi 17 – swastika night – katharine burdekin

08 vi 17 – creation stories – alan McGee

20 vi 17 – your pretty face is going to hell – dave thompson

23 vi 17 – reaper cockos fx guide – geoffrey Francis

23 vi 17 – beautiful you – chuck palahniuk

24 vi 17 – the blade artist – Irvine Welsh

09 vii 17 – buried – mark Billingham

12 vii 17 – sabre-tooth – peter O’donnell

17 vii 17 – inside out – nick mason

18 vii 17 – the man with the golden gun – ian fleming

18 vii 17 – love, sex and other natural disasters – (the Onion)

31 vii 17 – lonely boy – steve jones

03 viii 17 – the cutting room – louise welsh

07 viii 17 – death message – mark Billingham

13 viii 17 – Prezident Scumbag – Rupert Dreyfus

21 viii 17 – colonel sun – robert markham

03 ix 17 – bloodline – mark Billingham

22 ix 17 – without you, there is no us – suki kim

23 ix 17 – the new bottoming book – dossie easton & janet w hardy

24 ix 17 – not the end of the world – Christopher Brookmyre

24 ix 17 – from the dead – mark Billingham

26 ix 17 – cockroaches – Jo nesbo

06 x 17 – hide and seek – ian rankin

12 x 17 – good as dead – mark Billingham

16 x 17 – I, Lucifer – Peter O’Donnell

18 x 17 – flesh house – Stuart MacBride

21 x 17 – tooth and nail – ian rankin

26 x 17 – the rhesus chart – Charles Stross

01 xi 17 – tomorrow is too late – Ray Moore

05 xi 17 – the redbreast – Jo Nesbo

09 xi 17 – blind eye – Stuart MacBride

13 xi 17 – rotten – john Lydon

15 xi 17 – dead man upright – derek Raymond

17 xi 17 – one fine day in the middle of the night – Christopher Brookmyre

22 xi 17 – the animal factory – Edward Bunker

24 xi 17 – strip Jack – ian Rankin

28 xi 17 – the dying hours – mark Billingham

10 xii 17 – the annihilation score – Charles Stross

18 xii 17 – shadowland – Douglas Thompson

24 xii 17 – nemesis – Jo Nesbo

28 xii 17 – dark blood – Stuart MacBride

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2018/01/29/fictionromance-buzzcocks/feed/0scatcandydie when you die – gg allinhttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/die-when-you-die-gg-allin/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/die-when-you-die-gg-allin/#respondSun, 07 Feb 2016 11:11:00 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=944Lemmy wasn’t that much of a shocker, was it? He’s been deteriorating for the last few years and it’s a tribute to his cast iron constitution that he made it to his seventieth birthday, beating Mick Farren, who ‘only’ made it to sixty-nine, in the process.
Bowie, though? I always kind of thought he’d go on forever, a law unto himself. ‘The next day’ saw him make a superlative comeback, as spot on as he ever was (and a hundred times what he was in the eighties, his nadir, for my money).
And after that astonishing comeback LP, he finds out he’s got the big C – so he plans and executes the ultimate ‘see ya’ note.
I got ‘Blackstar’ the day it came out and on first play, it really wasn’t much good. Proggy noodlings, vague lyrics and yeah, that voice. It took maybe four plays before I groked it – realised it was brilliant and every time I went back to it over the weekend, it grew on me a little more.
I was just about to leave for work on the Monday morning when She-Who-Reckons-She-Should-be-Obeyed told me he’d died. I couldny believe it. It was wrNog information, in a language I couldn’t compute.
Turned out she was right, though. He had perished. I hopped on the train to work and put ‘Blackstar’ on. Again. Suddenly the album, the sombre sense of it, the stark lyrics, it all pointed to someone making their last goodbyes. I started welling up.
After Hendrix died, people started to look for premonitions of his mortality in his lyrics, particularly those of ‘Electric ladyland’, which are so open ended, you could probably find mentions of personal computers, mobile phones and Internet porn in there if you looked hard enough. ‘Blackstar’, though?
Bowie had known of his cancer for eighteen months. The entire planning and execution of this LP must have been done with the great dark cloud hanging over him. And he still went out, every inch the showman. He primed us with the the single (all ten minutes of it) gave us the LP for a weekend and then let go, leaving without an encore, the LP in its entirety, his last word on the subject.
Even Cecil Parkinson’s death wasn’t enough to cheer me up after the loss of Lemmy, Bowie, Boulez and Buffin. Why oh why, is Death harvesting my record collection instead of panelists on ‘Question time’?

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]]>https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/die-when-you-die-gg-allin/feed/0scatcandygenetdo it again – steely danhttps://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2016/01/31/do-it-again-steely-dan/
https://scatcandy.wordpress.com/2016/01/31/do-it-again-steely-dan/#respondSun, 31 Jan 2016 11:50:00 +0000http://scatcandy.wordpress.com/?p=94299% of fiction, I’ll read once and never consider going back to. William S Burroughs, I can reread, mostly down to the gorgeous ‘poetry’ of his prose. I am, after all, a schemie. The urban poor. I object to poetry. It undermines my manhood.
When I got my first e-reader, back in 2011, practically housebound with Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome, the first thing I did was reread a fairly random fistful of novels I’d read back in the day. Oddly (and again, fighting off this PVFS) I’m rereading some of my favourite fiction authors. Hubert Selby jr, Irvine Welsh and Jean Genet being the first three to hand.
The Selby novels I’ve long meant to return to – and on the second serving, everything I remember is there. The plotting, the sheer stark inarticulacy (or directness) – it’s like speed-reading Ramones lyrics. Being thirty years older, I’m spotting completely different things than I did the last time I read these.
I had a similar experience, rereading Mishima’s ‘Seas of Fertility’ quartet a few years ago. Reading it at seventeen/eighteen, I identified with Kiyoake (and his various incarnations) after all, I was that age, weak and sickly as he was at the end of ‘Spring snow’ and stubborn and principled as Isao from ‘Runaway horses’ and the others…
Returning to the work at forty-nine/fifty, it was Honda I immediately recognised myself in. A financially comfortable, but slowly decaying old perve, almost but not quite able to touch life.
The Welsh books are actually a lot different to how I remember them. ‘The acid house’, in particular, reads a lot better now I’m twenty years older. I always remembered it as quite jagged, thrown together like a band trying to cram everything into their debut LP. Half of it read like exercises from his writing group – and the other fifty percent was brilliant.
I just went back to ‘The thief’s journal’ this afternoon and already, I’m re-hooked on the fragility of Genet’s writing. I haven’t read a lot of his work since I was maybe nineteen, twenty. Although ‘Funeral rites’, I didn’t get around to til about twenty-four, twenty-five.
There’s rarely time to revisit great fiction, so when I do, it’s often like falling back into somewhere familiar-ish, but this time, with better hearing and eyesight, ironically enough.